FROM THE MAGAZINE

Mike Nichols’s Life and Career: The Definitive Oral History

A glittering cast of Nichols’s friends share with Sam Kashner and Charles Maslow-Freen their stories of a refugee from Hitler’s Germany who lived his own inimitable version of the American Dream. Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep, Dustin Hoffman, and more remember the comic genius, a groundbreaking director and true bon vivant.

OVATION
Mike Nichols, center, honored with the American Film Institute’s 2010 Life Achievement Award, in Culver City, California. Nichols’s wife, Diane Sawyer, is at far right.

By Frazer Harrison/Getty Images.

Mike Nichols, who died at home in New York last November 19, 13 days past his 83rd birthday, left a crater-size hole in the cultural landscape and in the life of the city he loved. He was that rare thing—a success in entertainment for six decades, beginning in the late 1950s with the classic comedy albums he made with the brilliant Elaine May (which had first been developed into a Broadway stage show, An Evening with Nichols and May, directed by Arthur Penn), then becoming one of the leading theater and motion-picture directors of the second half of the last century. He directed such landmark films as The Graduate, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Carnal Knowledge, and Silkwood, as well as 22 Broadway plays, including the 2012 revival of Death of a Salesman, starring the late Philip Seymour Hoffman. Nichols is one of only 12 people to have won an Emmy (for best director of a television play and mini-series, for Wit and Angels in America), a Grammy (for best comedy album, with Elaine May, in 1962), an Oscar (for best director, for The Graduate), and a Tony (nine in all). Colloquially, this achievement is called an E.G.O.T.

Nichols was born Mikhail Igor Peschkowsky in 1931 to Jewish parents living in Berlin. His father was a physician, who fled to America to escape the growing menace of the Nazis. In 1939 he sent for seven-year-old Mikhail and his three-year-old brother, and in 1940 his wife escaped through Italy and joined the family, who settled in New York City.

ERIC FISCHL(painter):

The last time I saw Mike [in the spring of 2014] was particularly sad. There was a show, “Degenerate Art” [featuring paintings condemned by the Nazis and the propagandistic artwork they celebrated], up at the Neue Galerie, so I said, Hey, do you want to go and check it out? As I’m walking across the park to meet him I get a call from [his wife,] Diane [Sawyer], who says, Don’t say that I called you, but could you please come and pick him up? It was closed that day, but we arranged to get a tour from the curator, so it was incredibly quiet—it was just us. And we start going through and the curator’s talking, and pretty soon Mike is moving ahead. He’s moving into the next room and the next, and I’m thinking he’s probably looking for a place to sit down, but he wasn’t. When he came back, you could see he was devastated. But then he started to talk to me about how he was in Berlin at the time [the Nazis were arresting Jews and vilifying nonconformist artists] and his father had left for America. The mother stayed behind—she wasn’t strong enough to travel. He was left with a kindergarten teacher who took care of him while his mom was in the hospital, and she watched out for him and hid him as the [Nazi] stuff was beginning to really unfold. And then when he and his mother finally left, the schoolteacher was arrested. That was the end of her. All these memories were flooding back to him. I was apologizing profusely—the last thing I wanted was to bring him back to that place—and he was like, No, no, no. It’s good to remember.

ERIC IDLE(writer, comedian, who wrote the book and lyrics for the 2005 Broadway musical Spamalot, which Nichols directed):

He was the best thing that ever came out of Nazi Germany.

EMMA THOMPSON(actress, who worked with Nichols on Primary Colors, Wit, and Angels in America*):*

It’s difficult to imagine, because he was such an emperor of New York, but in fact Mike was always an outsider, and that was terribly important to me.

CANDICE BERGEN(actress, who starred in Nichols’s Carnal Knowledge*):*

At what age did he become “Mike”? Because it couldn’t have been easy being Igor in New York at that time.

ART GARFUNKEL(musician, actor, who worked with Nichols on The Graduate, Catch-22, and Carnal Knowledge*):*

Let’s face it: Mike Nichols is a construction of a human being. He is busy leaving this guy who left Germany behind and becoming a very appealing American guy named Mike Nichols. What a choice [for a name] : Mike Nichols.

HANNAH ROTH SORKIN(Nichols’s assistant, whose mother, Ann, was the costume designer for many of his movies, including Working Girl, The Birdcage, Wit, and Heartburn*):*

He would never ever, ever touch anything vaguely Holocaust-related. He had tremendous survivor guilt.

BOB BALABAN(actor, who was in Catch-22*):*

Mike was a real observer, which probably had something to do with being such an outsider—the fact that he came when he was seven, didn’t speak the language, was a complete stranger to everything in America.

The irony is that with The Graduate he became the great interpreter and satirist of quintessential American behavior.

In 1950, Nichols enrolled at the University of Chicago, with the aim of becoming a doctor. Instead he met Elaine May, a raven-haired beauty with a devastating wit. The two began exploring improv comedy at Chicago’s Compass Players, the original incarnation of the famed Second City comedy troupe, before breaking off to form their own nightclub act, which established them as a celebrated comedy duo.

CANDICE BERGEN: He was talking the year before he died about being at the University of Chicago, because it was so idyllic for him there, meeting [writer and cultural critic] Susan Sontag in line, registering for classes. Finally he had a home.

ERIC IDLE: He and Elaine [May] met on the bench in the subway. I love that. He sat down next to her and says, “The speckled hen lays at midnight,” and she went straight in: “Beware the four feathers at dawn.” [In an interview Nichols and May did with Sam Kashner in Vanity Fair in January 2013, Nichols recalled them meeting at the subway. Pretending to be a Russian spy, he sidled up to Elaine and said in a thick Russian accent, “May I seeet down, plis?” Elaine said, “If you veesh.” Mike then continued, “Do you haff a light?,” and May said, “Yes, zertainly … ”]

My stepbrother is [songwriter-satirist] Tom Lehrer. He did a couple of nightclub performances at the Hungry I, in San Francisco, and then at the Blue Angel, in New York. Tom was the lead act, and Nichols and May were second, and I went every night.

JULES FEIFFER(cartoonist, who wrote the screenplay for Carnal Knowledge*):*

I was working at a schlock cartoon studio called Terrytoons. I came home one night and had my usual dinner, tuna noodle casserole, and I had [the live television show] Omnibus on, and Alistair Cooke, the M.C., introduced this new young couple, Mike Nichols and Elaine May. I mean, it was as if I had thought this up, except it was funnier and better.

I didn’t know there was anybody working this vein except me. At the end of it, I said, I have to meet these guys.

STEVE MARTIN(comedian, actor, who appeared in the 1988 Off Broadway revival of Waiting for Godot, which Nichols directed):

I used to fall asleep at night as a teenager listening to Nichols and May—his rhythms and her rhythms—I just absorbed it. I loved it. My favorite record that they did was one they did without an audience called Improvisations to Music.

LORNE MICHAELS(producer of Gilda Live, which Nichols directed):

I was in high school in Canada. When [the British comedy team] Beyond the Fringe arrived, then Nichols and May, and later [Monty] Python, we went, Oh, these are writer-performers. The same thing was happening in music—Neil Young and Joni Mitchell and Gordon Lightfoot. Something turned in the culture, and it’s never been the same since.

Artie [Garfunkel] was a big fan of Mike’s, too. We used to do Nichols and May lines all the time right before we went on.

MARTIN SHORT(actor, comedian):

What’s fascinating about the Nichols and May stuff, if you play it right now, is that it could have been done yesterday, because it’s not tied to references—it’s tied to human behavior.

STEVE MARTIN: When those two got talking—Mike and Elaine—[at dinner] it was just like watching a well-prepared show, even though you know they’re ad-libbing. They weren’t monopolizing the table; they were just having a conversation that you just wanted to listen to and preserve forever.

Because I’m an idiot and I never learned not to censor stupid questions, I said, Hey, Mike, how come you and Elaine never got roped into doing bad TV? And he said that they got all the way up to the point where they were meeting at CBS, and at some point Elaine just said, Well, maybe we just shouldn’t do this at all, and he said, Yeah, let’s not. And I thought, Man, who does that?

Nichols established his directing career in the theater, with such Broadway comedy hits as Barefoot in the Park, Luv, and The Odd Couple. In 1966 he went to Hollywood to direct Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in the film version of Edward Albee’s controversial, profanity-laced play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The movie, like the play, became a huge critical and financial success. Nichols followed this in quick succession with three more classics: The Graduate, Catch-22, and Carnal Knowledge.

FRANK RICH(cultural critic, former New York Times drama critic):

The Odd Couple [Neil Simon’s 1965 Broadway comedy hit, directed by Nichols] was one of my great learning experiences. I was a ticket taker at the National Theatre in Washington, so I got to see it for free repeatedly during the two- or three-week [pre-Broadway] run. The first act, to this day, is the funniest staging of anything I’ve ever seen in the theater.

CANDICE BERGEN: We became friends when he came to L.A. He was the quintessential New Yorker in L.A., which, in those days at least, was just defined by dopey. The first house he rented was [film producer] David Selznick’s, and it was the most glamorous old Spanish house, way up at the top of the canyon. And I remember him saying, “[People in L.A.] don’t know what houses are supposed to look like or how you’re supposed to lead your life because nobody’s told them.”

DAVID GEFFEN(entertainment executive):

Mike was complaining to me about how when he was first in Hollywood he didn’t know anybody and never got invited anywhere, blah blah blah.

Anyway, a friend of mine says, Oh, did you see these movies on YouTube of summers at [actor] Roddy McDowall’s house at the beach? So I’m watching these movies, and there’s Mike Nichols! I called Mike and said, What are you talking about? There you are with Natalie Wood! He said, I was never there. I said, I’m looking at you.

TOM FONTANA(writer, producer):

I asked him, How did you get to direct Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as your first movie? He said, “I sucked up to Elizabeth Taylor.”

HANNAH ROTH SORKIN: He tells that story about borrowing the suite in Cannes to impress the Burtons. There’s constant fronting, no matter how rich he is.

ERIC IDLE: He went to see [film director] Billy Wilder, and he said, Tomorrow I am directing my first film, with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. What shall I wear?

TOM HANKS: They were fighting the censors. The Catholic Church was going to ban the movie. And so he brought Jackie [Kennedy] along for the screening with the monsignor or the bishop—whoever was going to pass judgment. And as soon as it was over, Jackie leaned forward with her head in between the monsignor and Mike and said, “Oh, Jack would have so loved your film.”

LIZ SMITH(columnist):

Liz [Taylor] used to say to me, You’ve seen a lot of women play Virginia Woolf—and I have, Elaine Stritch among them—and she’d say, Tell me the truth: was I the greatest? And I’d say, Well, you had Mike Nichols.

MARLO THOMAS(actress, who appeared in Nichols’s 1965 London staging of Barefoot in the Park and his 1986 Broadway staging of Social Security*):*

He called me [years later] and he said, How would you like to do a television version of Virginia Woolf? I said, Why? He said, Because I know how to do it now…. And Mike tried for a while [to get the rights], and finally he said, I give up.

PAUL SIMON: He contacted us and asked if we were interested in writing and performing the score for this movie [The Graduate] that he was about to make. I don’t think he had the script yet. He sent the book. I didn’t like the book. I thought it was sort of a bad Catcher in the Rye imitation, but I wanted to work with him, and so did Artie. It was a little intimidating at first to be around Mike. He had just been nominated for an Oscar [for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?].

MARLO THOMAS:The Graduate was the first real Mike film. Virginia Woolf had a lot of Albee in it, but The Graduate was … it was Mike—every take, every look, every little mumble.

DUSTIN HOFFMAN(actor, who starred in The Graduate*):*

My agent, Jane Oliver, calls me and says, They want to audition you for this movie called The Graduate, with Mike Nichols directing. I read it, and I said, What the fuck is going on? I’m not right for this. A five-foot-eleven-inch Wasp with blond hair, blue eyes? I’m a character actor, but there’s a limit. I said, Mr. Nichols, you want somebody like Robert Redford—I didn’t even know Redford had tried out. He said, You don’t want to do it because you’re Jewish. And I said, Yes. And he said, Well, maybe [Benjamin’s] Jewish inside. And I said, O.K., I’ll audition.

Once he cast us we all met around the table, and Mike says, O.K., let’s read it, which is what you do when you’re doing a play. And I remember he said, It’s a comedy, but please don’t try to be funny—just read it straight. And we did, and he said later he was ready to throw up because he thought it was a flop. We took him too literally.

PAUL SIMON: Art told Mike that I was working on a song called “Mrs. Robinson,” and Mike came to me and said, You’re working on a song called “Mrs. Robinson” and you haven’t told me? And I said, Well, I am, but I don’t know if it fits the movie. Sometimes I sing “Mrs. Robinson,” sometimes I say “Mrs. Roosevelt,” and I haven’t decided which one is more appropriate. And he said Mrs. Robinson [the name of the female lead, played by Anne Bancroft, in The Graduate]. So that was that.

Then we sang it live to the movie as it went along. We sang to the film.

We’d take a break every once in a while and go outside and smoke a joint, which Mike didn’t do. And then he said to us one day, I’m wise to you, you know. And then we turned him on to smoking pot.

JULES FEIFFER: When I wrote [the Broadway play] Little Murders, I sent it to Mike to direct, and I never got an answer. I stopped speaking to him. For two years I didn’t say a word.

And then I went to a screening of The Graduate, hoping madly it would be lousy, wanting nothing but bad things for him. There hadn’t been much advance word. And from the first shot of Benjamin, I just inhaled this entire movie the way I inhaled [Nichols and May] on Omnibus, and by 20 minutes into the movie, I was thinking—instead of I hope it fails—I was thinking, Don’t fuck it up. Don’t fuck it up. Don’t fuck it up.

I went home and wrote a love letter to Mike telling him that this was a revolutionary film, and it seemed within five minutes I got a hand-delivered letter back, wildly grateful, and we were on again.

TOM HANKS: Three years after [The Graduate] comes out, they’re saying, And here’s the film that defined a generation. It was already the Citizen Kane of disaffected youth.

LORNE MICHAELS: How do you follow it? And of course, you don’t.

ART GARFUNKEL: I was talking with the nuns outside my brownstone on 68th Street on the Upper East Side [in 1966]. And Mike pulled up in a limo. He rolled down the window. I hadn’t seen him since The Graduate. He hands me a script and says, “Arthur, read the script. I see you as Nately in this.” “Mike, I’ve never acted.” “I know. Read it anyway.”

PAUL SIMON: After we finished work on The Graduate—or maybe even before we finished—Mike said, My next movie is Catch-22. He wanted Artie and me to be in it, and we said, Yeah, of course. We were thrilled.

And then he called me up late one night and said, “We’ve been working on the script, and it’s so long that we’re going to have to write your part out … so I guess that means Artie will be out, too.” And I said, No, no, no, don’t be silly—you don’t have to take Artie’s part out.

ART GARFUNKEL: He came by the hotel [during the filming of Catch-22], and we took a walk past the pool. “So, are you comfortable, Art?” I went, “This is new for me, to act.” I was two weeks into it. “Are you confident?” “Actors are really babies, aren’t they, Mike?” He said, “No, no. Add crazy to that and you will really get the full picture.”

PAUL SIMON: When he offered Artie a role in Carnal Knowledge, Artie didn’t tell me. I heard about it from [actor] Chuck Grodin. I asked Artie if it was true, and he said, Yes, and I said, Why didn’t you tell me that?, and he said, I was afraid that if I told you that you would stop working on [the 1970 album] Bridge over Troubled Water. And I thought, I don’t want to deal with this. And so that was the last album we made together. I think we would’ve broken up anyway, but this set it into motion earlier.

CYNTHIA O’NEAL(actress and co-founder with Nichols of the charity Friends in Deed. She appeared in Nichols’s films Carnal Knowledge, Heartburn, Wolf, and Primary Colors*):*

You know, Brando was obsessed with Carnal Knowledge. He watched it over and over. He just was mesmerized by that film.

Over the years, both in theater and film, Nichols became known as the actor’s director.

MERYL STREEP(actress, starred in Nichols’s Silkwood, Heartburn, Postcards from the Edge—for which she was nominated for an Academy Award—and Angels in America*):*

I think Mike was so loved by his actors because he was an actor. Yes, yes, of course he had the director jones and style and panache; he knew how to set the scene and move the camera, but what he was known for, in my community, was how great he was at allowing a performance that he knew resided within someone and giving actors the space in which to release it…. If he cast you, he trusted you to bring it, and the only piece of direction I ever remember him giving was: surprise me.

ANNETTE BENING(actress, who appeared in Nichols’s films Postcards from the Edge, Regarding Henry, and What Planet Are You From?):

I remember when we first started working on [Regarding Henry], I was so nervous, thinking, Oh, my God, it’s Mike Nichols, it’s Harrison Ford—I’m the person who doesn’t know anything, and they know everything. And I remember the first day we were working and Mike was saying, You know, it’s amazing. No matter how many times you do this, you still have to overcome the same fears and nervousness. And I remember that really stuck in my head because I thought I was the person that was supposed to be nervous, and you were the person that was, you know, all on top of it and cool.

DUSTIN HOFFMAN: [When we were filming the hotel scene in The Graduate], Mike said, Have you ever been nervous, really nervous—did you ever take a girl to a hotel? I said no, I hadn’t. Have you ever been nervous about anything sexual? I said, Well, I remember—and it just came to me—purchasing—we didn’t call them condoms; we called them rubbers, and the fancy word was prophylactics.

He said, O.K., let’s play the scene like you’re getting a dozen prophylactics. And he hit it.

HANK AZARIA(actor, who appeared in Spamalot and The Birdcage*):*

He’d say, “No, no, dear boy”—by the way, he’s the only person I know who could get away with calling me “dear boy”—“dear boy, here’s how we’re going to do it.”

WHOOPI GOLDBERG(comedian, actress; Nichols produced her two Broadway shows):

Mike came to see a show I was doing at the Dance Theater Workshop, and one of the characters I did talks about Anne Frank. So he connected to it, and, in tears, said to me, I’d like to present you on Broadway, and I was like, O.K. A few months later, I said, Maybe this isn’t right. He said, Why not? I said, Well, what if I suck? You sucked before, right? I said, Yeah. So you’ll suck on a bigger stage. He would never say sucked.

TOM HANKS: If we had a four-hour rehearsal schedule [for Charlie Wilson’s War], we’d spend 3 hours and 45 minutes talking about everything under the sun, and for 15 minutes we’d read a little bit. And then when we would be having dinner in Morocco or a place like that, it would be the same thing: we’d have a five-and-a-half-hour conversation around the table, and without even knowing it we were somehow commenting on the film and the work that we had done that day and the work that we were going to do the next day.

JULES FEIFFER: With Mike it was always about the work and never about his ego, never about his sense of importance. It was about storytelling; it was about the relationships. It wasn’t about a laugh, but if you could get a good laugh, why not.

DAVID HYDE PIERCE(actor, who appeared in Spamalot*):*

He said once you have figured out exactly how to get your laugh—he described it as your favorite squeak and turn—don’t do that. You could always do it again the next night. It’s the greatest gift you can ever give an actor because it frees you from ever saying, Oh, I didn’t get my laugh there. Sometimes you discover there’s a huge laugh two lines later that never would’ve happened.

WHOOPI GOLDBERG: I would be in the middle of rehearsing, and you’d hear this loud sigh, and he would say, Are you going to keep talking? Because this piece ended five minutes ago and you’re still talking. And he was absolutely right.

ERIC IDLE: He could make grown men cry at notes, which I saw on a couple occasions.

[On Spamalot] he’d still be giving notes after four years on Broadway. “Get the cast in.”

EMMA THOMPSON: I think that one of the most vital things he ever asked of all of us is: What’s the event? What’s actually happening here? And are you doing too much, something that’s completely unnecessary? “That’s a hat on a hat,” he’d say.

HANK AZARIA: I was having trouble in one scene with Nathan [Lane, in the 1996 movie The Birdcage], where I’m getting him ready for the show and he’s refusing to go on. I said, Mike, I don’t know how to play this scene because it’s very obvious that this dynamic happens every time, but they’re treating it as if it’s a disaster. And Mike said, Your character is partially based on Judy Garland’s dresser. Judy would panic before every performance and her dresser would panic with her and he would panic more than her so that she’d have to be the one to tell him to calm down, and that was the ritual they had. And I was like, Brilliant! No other directors say things like that to you, at least in my experience.

MATTHEW BRODERICK(actor, who appeared in Nichols’s 1988 film Biloxi Blues*):*

He was very actor-y and all that—you know, great notes. But sometimes he would just make a face and tell you to make that face.

EMMA THOMPSON: He was good at casting, which my father, who also was a director [Eric Thompson], said is 90 percent of the job. He might have been absolutely dreadful at directing some actors—he just chose the ones he could direct.

JULES FEIFFER: He said, There’s a guy named Nicholson in [the 1969 movie] Easy Rider—have you seen it? I said no. So I went. I didn’t like the movie, and I didn’t like Jack Nicholson. Mike said, Trust me, he’s going to be our most important actor since Brando, and I trusted him. And I worried if Candy Bergen [in Carnal Knowledge] was good enough, and he said, Trust me, and I trusted him.

Over and over again I would have my doubts, and over and over again he proved right.

STOCKARD CHANNING(actress, who appeared in Nichols’s 1975 film, The Fortune, and Heartburn*):*

I remember Mike and Jack [Nicholson] and I had supper, after [Nichols’s 2013 revival of the Harold Pinter play] Betrayal, and we dropped Jack off, and we shared a car to the East Side, and I remember he referred to Jack; he said, He’s pure gold. It chokes me up because he meant that on every possible level. He really loved him, and it came out in that moment. I’ll never forget sitting in the back of that car with Mike. He shook his head. It was as if he couldn’t believe that such a person existed.

DAVID HYDE PIERCE: The underlying message of all his direction is: You are enough. I don’t need more than you; I don’t need less than you. You’re enough.

TOM STOPPARD(playwright, who wrote The Real Thing, which Nichols directed on Broadway):

He was unlike most of us in the way he just invested completely in somebody he decided was a good thing, whether an actor or a writer or a show. His enthusiasm was total.

Maybe twice a week he would talk about some new person he’d seen performing who was life-changingly good. He didn’t skimp in his praise.

BUCK HENRY(Nichols’s school classmate, actor, screenwriter for The Graduate, Catch-22, and The Day of the Dolphin*):*

There were times when he would call in the middle of the night to say, Have you seen so-and-so? It’s not open yet, but you’d better go right away and see it, which happened half a dozen times in our relationship.

2001: A Space Odyssey was one. He said, It’s a religious experience—get to it.

BOB BALABAN: I got the feeling that when I was with him I could do anything. And I’m not an actor who particularly feels they can do anything.

MERYL STREEP: I heard from a witness on the set of Working Girl that he was trying to get a very reluctant Melanie Griffith to feel comfortable vacuuming semi-nude. He volunteered confidently: Meryl would do it. Ha!

ERIC IDLE: He could be brutally frank. We had one actor [in Spamalot]—we had to cut his big scene, and he went around moaning and pissing and grumbling. Mike said, I see I have to give you my asshole speech. He said, Look, you can either be an asshole and leave or you can get with the team and understand this is not about you. This is about making the show better. And the guy was lovely and adorable ever after.

MICHAEL HALEY(assistant director on several of Nichols’s films, including Working Girl, Angels in America, and Closer*):*

He could do more with a sentence to make you want to find a hole to crawl into than most guys could do with a gun or a sword.

But one time I called Mike and said, Barbra Streisand has been asked to do [the 1991 movie] The Prince of Tides. Do you have anything coming up? No, no, go ahead. And then, at the last second, Mike calls and says, I’ve got something. And I said, But, Mike, I’m about to go. And he says, Who would you rather have mad at you, me or Barbra?

MATTHEW BRODERICK: One of the really mean things he would say fairly often was “Let’s do it again, but let’s pretend it’s a real movie.”

HANNAH ROTH SORKIN: He was always like, Don’t hate me. Please, don’t hate me. Don’t be mad at me. That fear of someone being angry at him was really big. And to still do what you need to do to get the results you need to get is a great tension.

DAVID GEFFEN: Mike wasn’t the easiest guy in the world, and he used to worry that there were times he hadn’t behaved. He remembered them all. And I used to say to him, Give yourself a break, for Chrissake. You have this in common with humanity.

PAUL SIMON: Having experienced similar career arcs, I could say this: it’s very hard when you’re in your mid-30s, with an extraordinary amount of fame and praise, to be nice.

I wasn’t very nice.

ERIC IDLE: And he always bore a grudge.

DAVID HYDE PIERCE: He was a big fan of real life. I remember him saying to us, If you’re running lines, and someone comes up and interrupts you and says, Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you were running lines—that’s the greatest compliment you can ever get as an actor, he said. Because they thought you were just talking.

ERIC IDLE: He would say to the actors, You’ve got to take this seriously. If you don’t believe in it, why should the audience? And I’m sitting here going, Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, except he’s giving notes [for Spamalot] on the Knights Who Say Ni!

TOM STOPPARD: I was sitting in the stalls, and a stagehand walked in with a chair in either hand, and he shouted to Mike, Which chair? And Mike instantly said, That one, indicating the one in his left hand. As the guy walked off, I was thinking, Christ, I’ll never be a director. The chairs weren’t that different, you know, and I said, What was it about that chair? He said, Nothing, you just have to answer instantly—you can change your mind later.

WALLACE SHAWN(actor, playwright, who wrote The Designated Mourner*):*

[When Mike appeared as an actor in David Hare’s 1997 movie, The Designated Mourner], he not only never missed a rehearsal but he was never late. He never said, Today I have to leave half an hour early because I’m promoting my film, or I have an important phone call. He just was a completely cooperative actor.

Not ever did he say, Well, that’s wrong, or try to direct it himself.

MERYL STREEP: There is a piece of film of him performing in The Designated Mourner, Wally Shawn’s terrific play. Mike suppressed it for years, went to great lengths to keep it out of circulation here in the U.S. I don’t know why, maybe because he just didn’t like to look at himself—a lot of actors share this reluctance. It was so naked, absolutely riveting and upsetting and funny and, well, just like life. It’s up there with the best things I’ve seen any actor do on film.

Sawyer and Nichols at Candice Bergen’s wedding, 2000.

By Eleanora Kennedy.

Nichols was not only the consummate professional. Among his many gifts was his gift for friendship, and he became close personally to many of the actors he worked with. At the time of his passing, there were hundreds of people in New York alone who considered themselves Mike Nichols’s best friend. He was a celebrated host, and his extravagant, exquisite taste was reflected in the ways he decorated his residences, a penthouse on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and “Chip Chop,” a 17.5-acre estate on Martha’s Vineyard, where he and Diane Sawyer wed, in 1988, at the Federated Church. He also owned a farmhouse on 60 acres in Bridgewater, Connecticut, and a ranch in Santa Barbara, California.

NATALIE PORTMAN(actress, who appeared in Nichols’s 2004 film, Closer, and his 2001 Shakespeare in the Park staging of The Seagull*):*

I feel like there’s a thing about people who were young in the 60s that made them always cooler than anyone who came after. They were irreverent and would make bawdy jokes, have a laugh, have a smoke, have a drink, eat delicious food, tell the best stories. Mike was like that.

Anyone could be in the room, and everyone would want to be around Mike.

JULES FEIFFER: [Director Elia] Kazan was one of his heroes, but Kazan deliberately conspired to create fights and acrimonious relationships [among his actors] because he thought that’s the way he’d get the best out of his performers. Mike did it as a love story.

JULIA ROBERTS(actress, who appeared in Closer and Charlie Wilson’s War*):*

The great thing for Closer was that we all—except for Jude [Law] and Clive [Owen]—Mike and Natalie and I, all packed up and moved to London and left our lives behind, and Mike, there was a sense of responsibility he took for displacing us. We’d all go out to dinner or he would screen movies for us on a weekend night that nobody had anything to do. It was so special, like he just was always taking care of us.

CANDICE BERGEN: He always lived like a prince. I don’t know where that came from. But he was more princely than anyone I ever knew.

ANJELICA HUSTON(actress):

He lived large, but there was also something modest about it, too, a sort of jewel economics, if you know what I mean: it was on a modest scale but incredibly precious. It wasn’t enormous or garish or outsized—everything was just perfect, elegant.

CANDICE BERGEN: I knew [Diane] when she was with [diplomat] Richard Holbrooke, and she had an apartment on Central Park West that she never furnished. She had a dinner there soon after she moved in, and there weren’t really any places to sit, other than the chairs around the table. She just didn’t care. She had more important, substantive pursuits, so she just left it all to Mike. And Mike would be going over fabrics and finishes with the decorator.

MARLO THOMAS: He once said to me, Phil [talk-show host Phil Donohue, Thomas’s husband] is so lucky that you do all of this. He said, Diane doesn’t even know what a swatch is.

TOM HANKS: We were going on vacation with the whole family, but it got screwed up and so we weren’t going anywhere. Mike said, Well, why don’t you take my place on the Vineyard? I’d never even been to the Vineyard. So he let us use this ridiculously historic place—Chip Chop is the name of the house. It used to belong to [actress] Katharine Cornell.

When we were building our house, we built one room that was based on the great room of Mike and Diane’s house, with fireplaces on each end. I just felt so fucking smart in that room.

JACK O’BRIEN(director, producer):

[If you were their guests] everything was thought of. You go down in the morning to the kitchen and there’s a New York Times for every person in residence in case you want your crossword. You look in the bathroom and everything you could ask for except a hypodermic needle is there for you—it’s unbelievable.

EMMA THOMPSON: Mike was always offering me, as a guest, just the best of everything. And sometimes I’d say to him, For God’s sake, let’s just have baked beans!

WARREN BEATTY(actor, who co-starred in The Fortune*):*

We were at his house in Connecticut [in the late 1960s]. [Writer] Lillian Hellman was there, and [actress] Julie Christie, and we played a game called Bartlett’s where you look into Bartlett’s dictionary of quotations and choose three quotes that are real and invent a fake one, and you have to guess which is the fake one. I never forgot Mike’s, which was “I left my hat in your hall, but not forever.”

NATALIE PORTMAN: He took me to Emma Thompson’s house once for the Fourth of July. We played the love-hate game. Everyone had to put hates and likes—five things that you either hated or liked—and then we picked them out of a hat, and you had to guess whose it was and whether it was a love or a hate. “Ballet” was one of his. It was hard to guess that he would hate ballet.

SUSAN FORRISTAL(Nichols’s friend, who appeared in Heartburn, Postcards from the Edge, Regarding Henry, and Primary Colors*):*

We were shooting a cocktail party in this very elegant town house, and my job was to be one of the elegant ladies eating caviar. So we start to shoot and he yells, “Cut! What kind of caviar is that?” And Mike comes up and he looks at it and he says, “This isn’t good enough. I want big, bubbled beluga caviar.” So they send this kid out to get caviar. It took an hour and a half. It wasn’t lunch break—it wasn’t anything. We’re just standing around waiting. The kid comes back: wrong caviar. “That’s not what I want! Someone go with him!” Scott Rudin as the producer is not only paying for all this caviar, three different kinds, but the clock is ticking. But he never said a word because it was Mike.

BOB BALABAN: The location [on Catch-22] was so difficult to get to, there were like two planes a week, and then you had to drive for about eight hours after the plane landed.

They had food from [the Manhattan up-market delicatessen] Zabar’s flown in occasionally, special stuff for Mike.

NICK PILEGGI(writer):

Mike was always calling [Pileggi’s wife, Nora Ephron] with recipes, and she was always calling Mike with recipes. Then Mike would send over a box of some brand-new ice cream he found in the Midwest. Then Nora would send him the first batch of Fran’s Chocolates with salt on them. They were bombarding each other with food.

Then we’d go up to Martha’s Vineyard, and he had his cook up there make concord-grape pie, and Nora was so jealous, she got the recipe, and we came home and made concord-grape pie. We spent an entire day just seeding the grapes.

CANDICE BERGEN: Until he had his heart surgery and it changed his appetite, he was such a gourmet and gourmand. He just loved food and would drive miles and miles for obscure fried-oyster places on the Vineyard, and then would drive from there to the best pizza place, and then would go home for lunch. Diane would just be sitting in the front seat with her head in her hands. She finally just said, O.K., I can’t keep up.

DAVID GEFFEN: He told me that [photographer] Richard Avedon taught him how to be a rich person. Mike considered Richard his closest friend.

TOM STOPPARD: [Mike] had this horse-breeding farm in Santa Barbara. I remember going to a horse sale once, and it was like a theater production—absolutely breathtaking. At the back of this large arena where we were all sitting, a herd of horses galloped past our eyes in what I now remember as moonlight. It was just extraordinary. He made something utterly memorable out of the buying and selling of horseflesh.

CANDICE BERGEN: I mean, you have no idea. It was a tented auction, it was at night, and he lit it—he had the best lighting people do it. And the sawdust was colored and had sparkles mixed in so that when the horses were led out at a canter, smoke coming out of their nostrils, it was like a locomotive coming onto the stage. There was a little three-person orchestra, and when the mare was brought out they played “The Most Beautiful Girl [in the World],” and she came out kicking up sparkles. He brought all of his showmanship to it because he was the great showman.

ANJELICA HUSTON: Oh my God, there were emirs and sultans, all sorts of Arabian dignitaries. At the end of this horse sale, in which some animals were going for millions, a whole backdrop opened up and the horses galloped off over the fields.

PAUL SIMON: We were standing together after the sale, and he said, “Not bad for a little boy from Berlin, huh?”

During the 1970s, which brought the critical and box-office failures of such of his films as The Day of the Dolphin and The Fortune, Nichols became disillusioned with Hollywood, and in the early 1980s, he fell into a crushing depression.

BOB BALABAN: His first 14 years everything he touched turned to gold. Then nothing he touched turned to gold for a while.

It’s like, what happened? He could do no wrong, and for a while he could do no right.

CANDICE BERGEN: He was always very embarrassed about [the 1973 movie The Day of the Dolphin]. I don’t remember why he did it. I suppose they paid him a fortune. But he knew that he had to get out of [Hollywood] to survive. That was very clear, and he did.

MATTHEW BRODERICK: He called it “the fish movie.”

DAVID GEFFEN: When John Calley was the head of production at Warner Bros., he offered Mike [the 1973 horror movie] The Exorcist, and Mike read it and decided it wasn’t for him. John said, You really should do this, Mike, because it’s going to be a giant, giant hit. And Mike said, Well, I suppose so, but I can’t see how to make a movie of this that I would be interested in making. Anyway, the movie gets made with [director] Billy Friedkin, and Mike is driving in Westwood, and he sees the longest line he’s ever seen in his life—literally, he said it was blocks long—and he follows the line to the theater, and it’s The Exorcist. And he calls Elaine on the phone and he says, Elaine, I am such a schmuck. I just passed the longest line I’ve ever seen for The Exorcist, and you know I was offered it and turned it down. And she said, Don’t worry, Mike, if you had made it, it wouldn’t have been a hit.

DUSTIN HOFFMAN: I bumped into him once at a restaurant. I hadn’t seen him in a while, and we’re always very warm and very affectionate to each other. He looked up and he whispered something to me. I said, What? He said, “Why didn’t you ask me to do [Hoffman’s 1982 smash hit movie] Tootsie?”

CANDICE BERGEN: They were colleagues [Nichols and Bergen’s French director husband, Louis Malle]. They didn’t work together, but they had great respect for each other. Money is less important to the French. Louis always wondered about the importance of money in Mike’s work, and if that didn’t compromise him in some way. [Louis] had been born wealthy, so he could afford not to care about it.

SUSAN FORRISTAL: [Novelist] Annabel [Davis-Goff, Nichols’s third wife] called me and said, “Would you come up for a few days? Mike is having a terrible time.” So I went up and we were taking a walk, and I said to him, What are your medications?

ANJELICA HUSTON: [The short-acting sleeping pill] Halcion! He went into this sort of Halcion panic where he thought he was going to lose everything and die. But oddly enough, one would never have been able to tell that he was emotionally fraught in any way. He always seemed very calm in his panic.

PAUL SIMON: That was awful, until they figured out what it was. He just was weepy, crying, and thought everything was over.

SUSAN FORRISTAL: A month later I got a phone call. He asked me to come over. So I get there, and he asked me, very matter-of-fact, he said, How did your sister kill herself? Because I think about it a lot. And I went, Shit, this is serious now.

MATTHEW BRODERICK: He said, “It manifested itself that I thought I had no money.” His accountants kept telling him, “You have plenty of money.” He just thought he didn’t have any money.

Nichols and Davis-Goff divorced in 1986.

SUSAN FORRISTAL: Anjelica and I went to visit him at the Carlyle [hotel], and he wasn’t feeling well at all. The depression was going on, but we didn’t know what it was. So we said, Come on, lie down on your bed, and we were giving him foot massages. And above his bed hung this amazing Balthus [The Guitar Lesson]. We went, You’re never going to get laid with that above your bed, because he’s now single. So we basically said, You’ve got to get rid of this picture—and he did. And he way undersold it.

ANJELICA HUSTON: I remember Suze and I were giving him a foot rub under the Balthus, and there was a storm imminent, one of those storms that attacks New York every couple of years. The windows had been taped up and we were waiting for the storm, for the hurricane to hit. He was sure this Balthus was bringing him bad luck. We recommended highly that he get rid of it, which I think he did for a quarter of what it was worth. It definitely had a creepy vibe. We were his worst advisers when it came to his collection.

SUSAN FORRISTAL: The guilt! Anjelica and I still go, “Oh!”

CARLY SIMON(musician, who wrote the music for Nichols’s 1990 film, Postcards from the Edge*):*

Annabel asked me to intervene. He was so vulnerable and trying to intellectualize all of what was going on. He dragged out every possible explanation there could possibly be.

SUSAN FORRISTAL: Carly arrived with big hair and smiles. We sat down for a few minutes and decided it was time to go to the hospital. I don’t know how, but we talked him into it. We went downstairs and got a taxi. It was during the [New York City] Marathon. We were going to Columbia Presbyterian, and it was just a nightmare—it took us an hour. He admitted himself, and it got better after that, but it was terrible.

MATTHEW BRODERICK: We would walk around the woods [on Martha’s Vineyard]. He still had a few horses at that time, and we’d go look at them. He had two llamas—they might have been alpacas—just wandering around. He told me, “Don’t ever buy anything that eats.”

Nichols with Emma Thompson while filming the HBO mini-series Angels in America, 2003.

From HBO/The Kobal Collection.

Nichols’s depression lifted, and he went on to direct two of his biggest movie hits, Working Girl and The Birdcage; the critically acclaimed Wit and Angels in America for HBO; and, on Broadway, Spamalot and the 2012 revival of Death of a Salesman, with Philip Seymour Hoffman.

LORNE MICHAELS: I went to a preview [of The Birdcage] with him and it destroyed, as we say in comedy. He was so happy because there was a time—it happens to all of us—you go in for a meeting at the studio and the implication is: Why are you here? We grew up on your stuff—you’re already in the Hall of Fame. You’re being treated politely, but you’re no longer in the game. But after the first preview, he knew, Oh, it’s going to work.

And then suddenly the entire attitude at the studio changed.

You can be an icon and treated badly. Steve Martin has this great joke about how after you have a flop you call your favorite restaurant and they go, Absolutely, Mr. Martin. How’s 5:45?

Nichols was married four times: to Patricia Scott from 1957 to 1960; from 1963 to 1974 to Margot Callas, with whom he had a daughter, Daisy Nichols; from 1975 to 1986 to Annabel Davis-Goff, with whom he had two children, Max Nichols and Jenny Nichols; and finally to broadcast journalist Diane Sawyer, whom he married in 1988 and who is his widow. Throughout he maintained his close relationship with Elaine May, though the relationship was not romantic.

NATHAN LANE(actor, appeared in Spamalot and The Birdcage*):*

It was wonderful to see Mike and Elaine together [during the making of The Birdcage, which she wrote and he directed] not only because it was their reunion but they had this wonderful relationship, and he was so tickled by her sense of humor. It was a kind of brother-and-sister relationship, and he was very protective of her. She’s so fiercely intelligent—she hardly needs protection—but she’d be eating at a catering table, and he would sometimes go over and just brush away a few crumbs. It was very sweet how he protected her and was very protective of her script.

CARLY SIMON: He talked about her a great deal. When Mike would talk about the great influences and loves of his life—in front of Diane—he would say, Elaine and Diane were the two women in his life who had made the biggest impression. I always wondered if that bothered Diane.

HANNAH ROTH SORKIN: [Throughout his life] he loved Elaine more than anything. That was his work wife, you know.

They’d just giggle, giggle, giggle.

JACK O’BRIEN: He was catnip to women, and he used it, and [early in life] very often acted upon it.

SIGOURNEY WEAVER(actress, who appeared in Hurlyburly and Working Girl*):*

I got engaged while we were doing Hurlyburly, and everyone came to the wedding.

I remember he came up to [my husband, director Jim Simpson] and me just at the beginning of the party—we were dancing to this great band—and he cut in, he looked at Jim, and he said, “Droit du seigneur.”

ANJELICA HUSTON: He was not the least bit misogynistic, which, given how most of those guys are, is very unusual. He really loved women and listened to them. He loved the presence of women, and that was another thing that kind of made him unusual, particularly in that era where the guys just seemed to love to hang with each other all the time. Mike liked to hang with the girls, and I think for all the right reasons.

WARREN BEATTY: I called Mike to tell him I was going to have a baby and get married to [actress] Annette [Bening], and Mike—I’ll never forget it—said, “You must remember … ” Long pause. “She’s perfect.”

LIZ SMITH: He had this whole phalanx of women, and he referred to them as “my wives.” I’d say, Are you going to see this play? He’d say, Yes, I’ll take one of my wives.

NATALIE PORTMAN: At his American Film Institute tribute, it was all women who were toasting him. I think Buck [Henry] was there, and maybe one other man, but it was like Meryl and Emma and Nora and Elaine…. He was like a feminist without trying.

EMMA THOMPSON: I’m sure one could bang on about his feminine side and everything, but I always thought of him as really very, very masculine.

NICK PILEGGI: Men are divided into two groups. There are guys who want to be Babe Ruth and there are guys who want to be Mike Nichols. That’s it.

DAVID GEFFEN: Warren Beatty told me an interesting story. He was talking to Diane—this is many years before she got together with Mike—and she said to Warren that he knew everybody and there were a couple of people that she’d love to meet: Stephen Sondheim and Mike Nichols.

MICHAEL HALEY: One day during Biloxi Blues, we were driving, and he says, “I met a woman.” I said, Oh good. He says, “Diane Sawyer!” I said, That’s great. “I’m going to marry her.” And he looked out the window with this half-smile on his face. And it wasn’t like, This is my next conquest. It was more like, There’s something about her. It was magical.

JACK O’BRIEN: I remember going to see Juan Darién, the Julie Taymor piece, and sitting two seats away from me were Diane and Mike and they were all in leather. And they were making out and necking the entire show. After, I said to him, What the fuck was that? Of course, he didn’t remember it.

JULIA ROBERTS: Look at Diane. Look at how long they were together and he was still smitten. She would just take his breath away—it was this mutual, active love affair.

CANDICE BERGEN: He described himself as Pinocchio who became a real boy. That’s the Diane effect. The Diane effect in his life was incalculable, and he just strove to be better, to equal her, or to even get close to who she was as a person. He would say, When she goes to a ball, all she does is just run a brush through her hair. He just couldn’t get over her lack of vanity and her intellect.

CHLOE MALLE(writer):

He would say, I go to dinners with Diane constantly. She’s just been to Afghanistan; she’s just interviewed Malala—no one wants to ask her anything. No one has any questions for Diane, no one cares. They just want to talk about themselves: their dental problem, their most recent movie—it’s always all about them.

TOM HANKS: I can only imagine the conversations those two had over coffee and pancakes in the morning.

DAVID GEFFEN: After he married Diane, he was the happiest that he’d ever been. He always said that and meant it. He said, I finally got it right.

TOM FONTANA: He was absolutely devoted to Diane. He was like a high-school kid in love with the prom queen.

CANDICE BERGEN: He brought lighting people in to re-light her because the lighting [on her show] was so unforgiving.

CHRISTINE BARANSKI(actress, who appeared in Nichols’s Broadway staging of The Real Thing and in The Birdcage*):*

He was completely up on [The Good Wife] and every other show on television. It was his and Diane’s favorite thing to just stay home and read or watch great television, because the last thing she wanted to do was get dressed up and have to schmooze. They loved their cozy life. And who wouldn’t want to snuggle up with Diane Sawyer? I mean, my God, nice work.

HANNAH ROTH SORKIN: He’d say, “I’ll have to check with the ball and chain.” But he could say that because he was madly, madly in love.

Nichols was in ill health for the last years of his life.

JACK O’BRIEN: He called me to see a screening of [the 2003 HBO series] Angels in America. And at the end of it I turned to him and I said, Not only do I think this may be the best thing you’ve ever done, it may be the best thing anybody’s ever done. And he burst into tears.

BUCK HENRY: Lincoln Center did a Nichols-appreciation evening. You go up on the stage and try to be funny while you’re raining endless compliments on this person. And at the end of our ass-kissing, Mike takes the microphone and says a paragraph about every one of his friends, each much more interesting than what we had to say about him. He shortstopped us.

ANJELICA HUSTON: He sat beside me at a dinner [for my memoir Watch Me] and he just seemed in a really good place. I told him that I was seeing somebody, but I haven’t been out with anyone since my husband died and I’m feeling a bit fragile. He just looked at me and said, “Go for it.” That was Mike. He wanted everyone to be as happy as he was.

RAFE SPALL(actor, who appeared in Nichols’s staging of Betrayal*):*

He really, really wanted [the 2013 Broadway revival of Harold Pinter’s] Betrayal to be a success. It was very important to him. And we got a bad review in the Times [by New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley], and it really upset him.

It’s a funny thing for me because I come from a theater landscape where you get a great review in The Times [of London], a bad one in The Telegraph, and a medium one in the Evening Standard, and it’s even. There’s not one guy with a monopoly on whether something’s good or not. It became—though it’s been beaten out since—the highest-grossing Broadway straight play [for a single week] in history. But everyone was really upset by the Times review.

CANDICE BERGEN: We saw him diminish physically. I mean, as brilliant as he was, he was not going to think his way out of it. And he was not helped by Ben Brantley either, let me just add.

I’ll never forgive him for that. It took away months—you just saw [Mike] go inert. He was like, “What more can I do?”

SUSAN FORRISTAL: We went to see a Brecht play in the bowels of the East Village. He’d already been sick, and he had this cough—oh my God, that cough. It was so frightening. And he started to cough and cough and cough, and you could tell it was serious. And finally the intermission came and one of us said, I think we should leave, and Mike goes, “Oh, I can’t leave. They’re expecting me to come backstage and that would mean I didn’t like the play.” But we finally talked him into leaving. Then he wanted to go to dinner. We kept saying, Go home! You’ve got to go home! Let’s skip dinner. And he kept saying, “No, because then Diane would know, and I won’t be let out again.”

DAVID GEFFEN: We would always go to lunch at either Marea or something he read about which we would only go to once. The next time we’d go back to Marea. And he always sat in the corner table when you walk in.

Anyway, he picked me up. We kissed—we always kissed—and I said, You look terrific. He said, I feel like I’m on borrowed time.

HANNAH ROTH SORKIN: I think the last time I saw him was at Phil Hoffman’s funeral. He was devastated.

CHRISTINE BARANSKI: I can’t tell you how many times in those last years I’d get together with him, and his eyes would fill with tears and he’d say, “I just can’t believe how lucky I am.”

His life really did come to this graceful dénouement.

WALLACE SHAWN: He wasn’t just lucky. He was someone who had the capacity to see his own luck and enjoy it. An awful lot of people who are lucky don’t recognize it and make everybody else sick by complaining about their lot when everyone else knows they’ve had such great luck.

Mike was very, very well aware of being a lucky person. He was passionately grateful for his having found Diane. I think he was aware every minute that Hitler might have cut off his life before he was 10 years old.

STEVE MARTIN: As we get older we either become our worst selves or our best selves, and I think Mike became his best self. He had learned so many lessons in life that he actually absorbed.

CANDICE BERGEN: I knew that when he was in the last three or four years he was feeling, you just don’t want it to end.

TOM FONTANA: The last few years, he was absolutely at the top of his form. His memory was going, but you know, what’s the difference? My memory sucks, too.

FRANK RICH: No one else would’ve found Dustin Hoffman and no one else would’ve felt that Phil Hoffman was ready for Willy Loman [in the 2012 Broadway revival].

CANDICE BERGEN: We all saw it coming. Diane kept him alive for longer than he should have been, and sorted out the mess of doctors. I saw him the day before he died. We had lunch together with a friend, and he gave me a lift home and he said, I’m just going to have a routine procedure. I’ll be home tomorrow afternoon. And I said, O.K., I’ll talk to you then. There are no routine procedures.

CHRISTINE BARANSKI: Mike talked about something in Sweden or one of those Nordic countries where people, literally, they get together with their family members, they have a wonderful meal, and they go to bed surrounded by their loved ones and say, O.K., that’s a wrap. Cut. He said, That’s what I want.

MICHAEL HALEY: He actually asked me once, when we were driving, he said, What do you think happens when we die? I told him I had my philosophies about what happens, and I said, What do you think? He said, “We wake up in our dreams.”

WALLACE SHAWN: The reading [for a new play of mine] was maybe 10 days before he died.

Mike not only read marvelously, he was, as always, the life of the party.

It’s a fortunate thing to die in a good mood.

Nichols during rehearsal for The Odd Couple at the Plymouth Theatre, New York City, 1965.

Nichols died of a heart attack on November 19, 2014, in his New York City apartment.

SUSAN FORRISTAL: You know how it goes—it’s like Rashomon. Everybody gets it wrong. The first thing that I heard was that he and Diane were in the car together, being driven to a dinner, or they were going to the theater, which I doubted. So then you start picturing this happening in the back of the car and her going through this by herself like some Jackie Kennedy nightmare—how do you deal with that? But apparently they were home together, thank God. The great thing is you’re at home with the one you love, but you never get that picture out of your mind.

CANDICE BERGEN: Max [Nichols] called the night that he died and I just stayed in bed the next day. I’d never done that.

TOM STOPPARD: It was the most wrenching bereavement I can ever remember experiencing. I’m not reconciled to it yet.

You just want to carry on thinking he’s up there high on the East Side, going into the Met, and going downtown to see a play.

ERIC IDLE: I miss him so much because—well, just to be able to pick up the phone—sometimes I’ll think of a funny line, and I’ll go, Oh, I have to tell Mike! He was a great appreciator.

CANDICE BERGEN: The gathering at his house that Diane had the week after he died—the apartment was filled with people. All of them were remarkable, and all of them had this deep, rich relationship with him. And I thought, How did he do it? I mean, how did he find the time?

Nichols’s legion of admiring friends and colleagues continue to revere both his intellectual prowess and original sense of humor.

CARLY SIMON: I talked to [writer] Renata Adler not too long ago, and we both said we didn’t know how to think anymore—we always would see everything through Mike’s eyes, and that now we didn’t know exactly what to think, about ourselves or anything else.

MICHAEL HALEY: We still work on movies in my dreams. Sometimes it’s fun, sometimes it’s insane, but he’s there and I’m always happy to see him. He’s with me constantly.

ERIC IDLE: He was a comedian first and foremost. That’s why I loved him.

And he was always very forthright about things he’d been through. Again, that’s a comedian thing; you never try and conceal what may be used against you. It’s a disarming dishonesty.

ERIC IDLE: We were once in St. Paul de Vence, going to lunch, and we passed this art gallery, and it had a Salvador Dalí statue there in the window. He went in and he said, “How much is that Dalí in the window?”

And he would say the most outrageous things. He came in once a bit late for rehearsal, and he said, “I’m sorry, but the whole Upper East Side was Yidlock.” He could get away with these jokes.

LORNE MICHAELS: He loved to laugh. Comedy is too important to be left to professionals because professionals tend to go, That’s funny, and nod.

HANK AZARIA: You’d have to cover him with a blanket and move him farther and farther from the set because he would laugh out loud. It’s like, Mike, what’s the matter with you? We’re never going to do it that well again!

MARTIN SHORT: I was doing a show on Broadway and it was really strenuous. I’m thinking, Oh my God, I’m so tired, I know how to do 80 percent today and get away with it. And then I say to my dresser, Who’s in the audience? And he says, “Mike Nichols, Diane Sawyer, and Stephen Sondheim.” I go, Oh fuck. I thought I was safe.

NATHAN LANE: Whenever you got together with him to have dinner, you felt like you had to cram for the final. You read up on everything going on in the world because he could speak about anything with a fresh insight and an intelligence that was rare, and you just wanted to keep up.

NICK PILEGGI: Mike could call Nora about a book that had been published in England but hadn’t been published here, and Nora would have read it. No one else I knew had read it, but those two had.

MICHAEL HALEY: Mike wasn’t one of those directors who comes in and says, “How ‘bout those Yankees?” It was more like “How ‘bout that concerto?”

ART GARFUNKEL: Didn’t he have a great, rich, educated voice? Wasn’t the sound of him making sentences the work of a consummate actor who was brilliant? Slightly nasal, resonant, very educated, witty—making you fall in love with him sentence by sentence by sentence.

TOM STOPPARD: He was a great artist, but he was also great at civilized living. He just thought we’re all part of this marvelous civilization at its best, and he was sensitive to the fact that civilization at its worst was happening simultaneously just out of sight.

NATALIE PORTMAN: He always had awesome theories about certain famous movies or books. Like [The Great] Gatsby—he would say, No one does it right. Gatsby isn’t Robert Redford. Gatsby is Dustin Hoffman. Gatsby’s the outsider. New money. He’s a Jew. Everyone gets it wrong. And The Sound of Music, he would say, Yeah, the blond family was the most at risk during World War II. He would always take things like that, things that I had taken for granted, the classics of my youth, and flip them on their head.

MARTIN SHORT: I remember one time Steve Martin and Mike and I had dinner at Spago in L.A., and he’s going on about Chekhov’s The Seagull—I think he’d just directed it. Then he leaves to go to the bathroom, and I turn to Steve and say, “Do you know what he’s talking about?” And Steve says, “Not a clue, but we must never, ever let on that we don’t.”